Oh man, I don't know how I managed that big of an err.  You're absolutely right about the slashes.  D'oh! Thanks for the word about EEM vs Tcl.

Sorry to zombie this thread.  Lots of great info here, but the regexp could use a bit of cleaning up: /d matches a numeric digit (same as [0-9]) * matches the previous character 0 or more times (optional set of characters) + matches the previous char...